Hey LQ,

I've read many guides on setting up vsftp, seems pretty straight forward however I can't seem to find a guide that explains clearly what I'm trying to do.

I'm trying to make it so I can have my FTP root for the ftp user set to /var/www/html. That is also pretty straight forward but I don't want the files that are uploaded or modified to change ownership away from www-data. When everything is owned by www-data the server works properly ( I have many cron scripts that perform cleans ups and edits for me but only when the ownership is owned by www-data )

Is it possible to make www-data an ftp user? Would that be the easiest solution?

From what I can understand from your post you want the following setup:

1. /var/www/html/ to be your local root directory. So anyone logging in will have their local root set to /var/www/html
2. You don't want the ownership of those file which is uploaded by the ftp user to be their user:group instead you want it to be owned by www-data.
3. You have cron scripts in place which perform the cleanups and edits but that only works when the files are owned by www-data.

If above is the case then you have to let us know what exactly your clean up scripts does and why www-data ownership is so much significant. What will happen if the files are not owned by www-data. Basically what breaks?

1 members found this post helpful.

This was a bad thread. I will rethink what my issue actually is and post again. Please delete this thread if you can.